Today we worked on the idea of adjectives helping authors grow their sentences to be more interesting to the reader. By using adjectives the author is helping us create a mental image of their text! We took a boring sentence and brainstormed different adjectives we could use to "grow" the sentence. We also got into a conversation about how to use a comma to separate a list of adjectives.
We have started to learn fractions of a whole and fractions of a set. As introduction activities we read a book called The Lion's Share which talked about animals sharing equally a birthday cake. So students were asked to share "birthday cakes" with one friend and three friends which lead to a discussion of how you could cut a cake in half or in fourth to share with others. We got to the understanding of fractions of a whole meaning the parts are equal size and shape. We then started building rectangles using square tiles to create rectangles that were half one color and half another color.
Yesterday we learned about our incubator that lives in Mrs. McNeal's room! She's an expert on hatching eggs so I let her handle this. :)
We talked about what the temperature and humidity levels need to be inside the incubator and how it acts like a mother hen sitting on the egg. The metal rods help us rotate the egg to help the baby chicks develop properly. Mother hens rotate their eggs so we have to do that work as well! The eggs will go in tonight and we will observe them over the next couple of weeks! To further investigate the structure of plane shapes and solid figures students constructed them out of marshmallows and toothpicks. This really helped them discover the vertices of these shapes!
We have been learning about plane (circles, squares, triangles, trapezoids, hexagons, rectangles) and solid (cone, sphere, cube, rectangular prism, cylinder) shapes. We identified the number of sides and vertices (corners). Then we went on a shape hunt through our school to find examples. Last this week, we took play dough and made examples of plane and solid shapes to create our "shape museum"!
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May 2015
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